Introducing Atom

Today, we are excited to launch the public beta of Atom, a new text editor that’s deeply programmable but also easy to use.

Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren’t very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.

We think we can do better. Our goal is a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability: an editor that will be welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won’t outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers.

As we’ve used Atom to build Atom, what began as an experiment has gradually matured into a tool we can’t live without. This is only the beginning, and there’s much to do before we achieve our full vision. But we already think we’ve achieved our basic goal. On the surface, Atom is the modern desktop text editor you’ve come to expect. Pop the hood, however, and you’ll discover a system begging to be hacked on.

We’ll be rolling out invites over the coming weeks, and we’ve open-sourced over 80 of the libraries and packages used in the editor. We’ve been aggressive about exposing the APIs you’ll need to write powerful packages, but this also means you should expect some flux as we incorporate your feedback. We’ll do our best to make changes as gracefully as possible while still making rapid progress during the beta.

We look forward to your feedback, packages, and pull requests. Let’s do this!